So I finally gave up: DecentURL — my URL nicifier inspired by a reddit comment — now requires you to have an account to create URLs. It was just used too much for phishing, spam, and porn.

I tried various measures to reduce spam: deleting bad URLs by hand, bot detection, IP blacklisting, etc. None of them were very effective — most of the spammers were probably human, and they always seemed to find ways around my (admittedly simple) protection schemes.

Plus, DecentURL has always been just a neat little side project. But I just don’t have the incentive or time to keep deleting spam. Not to mention actioning emails from PayPal asking me to delete nasty phishing URLs.

I also realise that URL redirection services have their problems: they add another link in the chain, slowing things down and meaning a higher probability for an outage.

Most URL redirectors also obscure the destination. I like to think DecentURL does a bit better here, because it keeps (at least part of) the original domain in the final URL. So http://xxxyucksite.com/blahblah will turn into something like http://xxxyucksite.decenturl.com/z instead of http://tinyurl.com/z.